Search Results

The pace of change in the business world is accelerating, driven by technological innovation, regulatory reform, the demographics of aging and the possibility that future growth rates may be below historical averages. How do executives navigate in an environment of hyper-evolution? By building and defending strong cultures—creating environments in which employees feel welcome, engaged and free to be authentically who they are. Where they feel they are part of something special and see themselves working to make a positive difference in the world.

The tight relationship between Washington and Wall Street is mutually destructive for both. “It’s the economy, stupid” says politics, and yet, the close link between finance and government restrains economic growth by virtue of it politicizing investment. Worse, the ties between finance and government make the bailouts of troubled financial institutions much more likely. The latter greatly weaken the financial sector, all the while inflaming an electorate that views bailouts as evidence of favoritism. This talk will show why the popularity and health of Wall Street and Washington will soar if the two create major distance between themselves.

Business today is about distinctive competitive strategies, game-changing technologies, and creative social media and marketing. But the most successful organizations, those built on fierce executive and nonstop innovation, work as distinctively as they compete. The first question great organizations can answer is: What separates us from our rivals in the marketplace? But the next question is: What holds us together as colleagues in the workplace? In an era of brash ideas and disruptive business models, organizations that create the most extraordinary value are the ones that generate the most widely shared sense of commitment, connection, and compassion among colleagues. Whether you’re in a fast-moving technology field or a more traditional, slow-to-change industry, your organization can’t be exceptional in the marketplace unless it creates something exceptional in the workplace. In a keynote that is at once highly strategic and deeply human, Bill Taylor draws on his access to some of the world’s most high-performing and creative workplaces to explore how organizations can unleash and sustain a culture of fierce execution and nonstop innovation. His ideas, lessons, diagnostics, and case studies are a pragmatic guide to the new world of work and a cutting-edge agenda for recruiting, evaluating, organizing, and retaining talent.

Among the questions he helps organizations and their leaders answer are:

Why should great people join your organization? The best leaders understand that the best rank-and-file performers aren’t motivated primarily by money. Great people want to work on exciting projects. Great people want to feel like impact players inside their organizations. Great people want to be surrounded with and challenged by other great people. Put simply, great people want to feel like they’re part of something greater than themselves.

Do you know a great person when you see one? In the most high-performing organizations, character counts for as much as credentials. In other words, at organizations that are serious about competing on talent, who you are as a person is as important as what you know at a moment in time. There’s a hard-headed business logic to this soft-hearted mindset. Companies with a distinctive set of ideas about how to create value in the marketplace need people whose values are in sync with that strategy. So the challenges becomes designing ways to figure out what makes people tick, not just how smart they are.

Are you great at teaching great people how your organization works and wins? Even the most highly focused specialists (programmers, designers, marketers) are at their best when they appreciate how the whole business operates and what determines whether it wins or loses in the marketplace. That’s partly a matter of sharing financial statements: Can every person learn how to think like a businessperson? But it’s mainly a matter of shared understanding: Can smart people work on making everyone else in the organization smarter about the business?

Does your organization work as distinctively as it competes? It’s a simple question with huge implications for productivity and performance. Leaders who are determined to elevate the people factor in business understand that the real work begins once talented people walk through the door. As you fill your organization with stars, it’s up to you to keep them aligned—to master the interaction between stars and systems that defines what it means to be a member of your organization and the sorts of promises and commitment colleagues make to one another.

Linda Kaplan Thaler is sought the world over to address a wide range of audiences, from Fortune 500 companies and leading tech companies to universities and educational groups, to international trade associations and beyond. She speaks on a variety of topics, including but not limited to:

Disruptive innovation is happening all around us in almost every industry. “Disruptive Innovation” can mean: disrupting your competitors, customer relationships, internal processes, reward systems, management strategy, the status quo and “last century thinking”. But how do you create a culture of innovation that enables a big company to think and act like a small one? Mark shares insights on world-class companies that struggled with change—some that failed to adjust to meet changing markets and others that reinvented their business models and transformed entire industries with disruptive innovations. Mark answers several questions that will help you understand how to:

Enable your teams to not only embrace change, but lead business transformation

Operationalize innovation while still meeting the demands of Wall Street

Remove the fear of failure for disruptive ideas

Create incentive systems that reward those that challenge “business as usual”

Mark shares insights into the top leadership qualities of the world’s Most Admired Leaders according to the most engaged employees. In a broad survey of over 10,000 employees in 110 countries, Mark’s research team identified the top eight leadership traits that people want from their leaders. He presents case studies from many of these leaders including his experience working directly with several of them. He outlines how the Most Admired leaders have achieved such enduring success over decades and how they consistently:

Recruit, Build and Retain the highest performing teams

Create a corporate culture that Inspires loyalty and engagement

Face adversity and bounce back from failures

Challenge themselves and their teams year after year to outdo themselves and achieve continuous and long-term growth

Learn what their MVP’s value and what drives them in their lives and work

Any commercial or economic crisis creates business opportunity. The real question is how to best prepare to take advantage of the opportunity. Frances Townsend's view - and her experience proves it - is that great leaders do not fear adversity, but are invigorated by their greatest challenges. Just as the pitcher who steps on the diamond with bases loaded and only one out, successful leaders cannot dread the critical moment, but instead are excited about the opportunity it presents. She knows how a crisis can foster positive change, by creating a new culture from within and building momentum to propel the organization forward. As the president's former homeland security and counter-terrorism advisor, Townsend shares her first-hand experience of testing in a true crisis and turns her recount into an opportunity to learn about ourselves and others, about egos and the willingness to listen, and about team trust and loyalty.